In this edition of the TC11 newsletter, we have updates regarding ICDAR 2017 and a deadline extension for the IJDAR Special Issue on Deep Learning for Document Analysis and Recognition. We are also very pleased to announce the recipients of the IAPR/ICDAR 2017 Awards. We briefly summarize these and other highlights for this month below.

Journal Special Issues: The submission deadline for the IJDAR special issue on Deep Learning in Document Recognition has been extended to Sept. 30th. Submissions for an upcoming special issue on Document Image Processing in the Journal of Imaging are due Oct. 31st.

ICDAR 2017

IAPR/ICDAR Awards. Congratulations to our IAPR/ICDAR 2017 Award winners, Prof. Rangachar Kasturi (IAPR/ICDAR Outstanding Achievements Award) and Dr. Alicia Fornés (IAPR/ICDAR Young Investigator Award). The citations for their awards may be found elsewhere in this newsletter. We also congratulate the 21 students who received an ICDAR 2017 Student Travel Award.

Program and Keynote Speakers. The program for ICDAR is now available online. The keynote speakers will be Prof. Rangachar Kasturi (recipient of the IAPR/ICDAR 2017 Outstanding Achievements Award), Prof. Andreas Dengel, and Prof. Xiang Bai.

Doctoral Consortium. The submission deadline for the ICDAR Doctoral Consortium is nearly upon us: September 1st (Submission Instructions). Please take a moment and seriously consider applying if you are a PhD student at the appropriate stage in your studies, as this is a valuable learning and networking opportunity.

Workshops, Competitions, and Tutorials. Lists of ICDAR workshops and competitions are provided in this newsletter, along with a Call for Papers from the Historical Document Image Processing Workshop (HIP). Information about tutorials at ICDAR may be found online (ICDAR Tutorials). If you are going to ICDAR, please consider attending the special workshop on the future of Document Analysis and Recognition research that will be free of charge.

We are pleased to announce the recipients of this year's IAPR/ICDAR Awards. The awards ceremony will be held during ICDAR 2017 in Kyoto, Japan.

IAPR/ICDAR Outstanding Achievements Award

Prof. Rangachar Kasturi for seminal research in document image analysis and graphics recognition shaping the evolution of the document image analysis field, and for outstanding leadership to both the ICDAR and the wider international pattern recognition community.

IAPR/ICDAR Young Investigator Award

Dr. Alicia Fornés for outstanding contributions in the recognition of handwriting, text and graphics, with high impact to the field of Digital Humanities, and her service to the IAPR Technical Committee on Graphics Recognition.

ICDAR 2017 is providing a Doctoral Consortium for PhD Students. The Consortium will run on Sunday November 12, the day before the ICDAR main conference. The goal of the Consortium is to create an opportunity for Ph.D. students to test their research ideas, present their current progress and future plans, and receive constructive criticism and insights related to their future work and career perspectives.

A mentor (a senior researcher who is active in the field) will be assigned to each student to provide individual feedback. In addition, students will have the opportunity to present an overview of their research plan during a special poster session.

If you are Ph.D. student planning to attend ICDAR 2017, we would like to invite you to join the Doctoral Consortium. If you are supervisor of PhD students, we encourage you to speak with your Ph.D students about the event and invite them to participate. Scheduled activities in the DC will be beneficial for both of you: suggestions that the students will receive from mentors will be beneficial for the Ph.D work and their research plan and will also be opportunities to develop new ideas for future work.

Participation in the Doctoral Consortium will be free of charge for all accepted students who are registered for ICDAR, and affordable hotel options are also included at the time of registration.

Let's discuss the future of document analysis and recognition. In the history of ICDAR in the last 26 years, we have been working in a variety of fields of document analysis and recognition, and have solved many important problems. The emergence of machine learning technologies, however, has shifted the nature of unsolved problems. For example, improving accuracy of methods for existing problems attracts less researchers. This brings us to the following questions: What are exciting open problems that interest more researchers? What are research topics young researchers and outsiders of the ICDAR community cannot help joining us?

This workshop is planned to discuss possible research topics and open problems to start new chapters of research on document analysis and recognition.

Workshop Format

The purpose of the workshop is to have deeper discussions about the future of document analysis and recognition. For stimulating the discussion, we have short presentation by invited speakers listed below to share their views of the future. After the presentation, we select some representative topics for discussion. Then participants and invited speakers are divided into some groups of selected topics for discussion. The results of discussion will be summarized at the end of the workshop and final results will be presented at the main conference. We plan to have a short summary presentation at the banquet and more detailed presentation and discussion at the panel on the last day of the conference.

It is our pleasure to announce that the 4th International Workshop on Historical Document Imaging and Processing (HIP 2017) will be held in conjunction with ICDAR 2017, on November 10-11, 2017 in Kyoto TERRSA, Japan. It will be a 1.5-days event, with sessions on the first day and a half-day excursion on the second.

Note that early-bird registration fees will apply to authors of accepted HIP papers until October 9. After that, only onsite registration is possible.

The workshop brings together researchers working with historical documents and is intended to be complementary and synergistic to the work in analysis and recognition featured in the main sessions of ICDAR, the premier international forum for researchers and practitioners in the document analysis community.

We are looking forward to your submissions for these Workshops. We also solicit your gracious support in circulating this information among your students, colleagues and scientific/research community to give it higher visibility.

Overview. DAS 2018 is the 13th edition of the 100% participation single-track IAPR sponsored workshop focusing on system-level issues and approaches in document analysis and recognition. The workshop comprises invited speaker presentations, oral, poster, tutorial and demo sessions as well as working group discussions.

DAS 2018 will be organized at TU Wien (Vienna University of Technology), in the heart of Vienna’s city center, which places the attendees within walking distance to a large variety of world-famous historical and cultural attractions. The program will include long and short papers, posters and demonstrations of working or prototype systems. All submissions will undergo a rigorous review process with a minimum of 3 reviews considering the originality of work, the quality of research or analysis of experience, the relevance to document analysis systems, and quality of presentation.

Information regarding paper submissions is provided below. Note: Submission of a paper involves a commitment that, if accepted, one or more authors will attend the workshop.

Full Papers. Full papers should describe complete works of original research. Authors are invited to submit original, unpublished research papers that are not being considered in another form, up to 6 pages length.

Short Papers. Short papers provide an opportunity to report on research in progress and to present novel positions on document analysis systems. Authors may submit short papers (up to 2 pages in length). Short papers will also undergo review and will appear in an extra booklet, not in the official DAS 2018 proceedings.

Demonstrations. DAS 2018 seeks public demonstrations of novel systems, to be presented to the workshop as a whole during breaks between paper sessions. Prospective demonstrators should submit a two-page summary of the system to be demonstrated. Demonstration proposals will undergo review and summaries of accepted demonstrations will appear in the extra DAS 2018 booklet, as in the case of short papers.

IJDAR Special Issue:Deep Learning for Document Analysis and Recognition (Deadline Extended to September 30)

In recent years, applying Deep Learning techniques to Document Analysis and Recognition (DAR) tasks has produced significant performance gains. These have included impressive advances in handwriting recognition, word-spotting in document images, document segmentation, and text detection in natural scenes.

This special issue aims to report new advances in DAR using deep learning methods. Articles presenting reviews, perspectives, new methods and applications in DAR are cordially invited. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to uses of Deep Learning for:

Document image processing and segmentation

Layout analysis

Character and text recognition

Scene text detection and recognition

Writer identification and signature analysis

Document retrieval

Context modeling

Graphics and symbol recognition

Other DAR tasks

Paper submissions are due September 30, 2017. For further information, please see the Call for Submissions.

IJDAR Discount for IAPR Members (repost)

IAPR is pleased to announce a partnership agreement with Springer, the publisher of IJDAR, the International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition. This new agreement will allow IAPR members to receive a subscription to the electronic version of IJDAR at a discount of nearly 50%. For additional details, see the links below:

Journal of Imaging, Special Issue: "Document Image Processing"

The Journal of Imaging (ISSN 2313-433X) is currently running a Special Issue entitled Document Image Processing. Dr. Ergina Kavallieratou (University of the Aegean, Greece) and Dr. Laurence Likforman-Sulem (Telecom ParisTech/TSI) are serving as the Guest Editors for this Special Issue.

The intention of this Special Issue is to collect the experiences of leading scientists of the field, but also to be an assessment tool for people who are new to the world of document image processing.

This Special Issue intends to cover the following topics, but is not limited to them:

Document Image Analysis

Document Understanding

Document Analysis Systems

Document Processing

Camera-based Document Processing

Document Databases and Digital Libraries

Mining Document Image Collections

Document Forensics [...]

The deadline for manuscript submission is October 31, 2017. For more details please visit the website:

Submitted papers should not be under consideration for publication elsewhere. We also encourage authors to send a short abstract or tentative title to the Editorial Office in advance (jimaging@mdpi.com and alma.wu@mdpi.com), as this will help us with planning.

The Journal of Imaging is an open access publication, which provides unlimited free access by readers. While open access publications typically require an article processing charge (or similar), the Journal of Imaging does not currently require authors to pay any sort of fee.

For further details on article formatting and the submission process, please see the instructions for authors at the journal website:

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